Patterns of activity in marine planktonic copepods: diel rhythms and driving factors
Olivares Requena, M. (2020). Patterns of activity in marine planktonic copepods: diel rhythms and driving factors. Thesis. Universidad De Barcelona/CSIC - Instituto de Ciencias del Mar (ICM): Barcelona. 155 pp.
Marine planktonic copepods play a key ecological role in pelagic food webs. The study of their patterns of activity is fundamental in order to better understand the processes involved in the transfer of energy from lower trophic levels to higher-level consumers in marineecosystems. This thesis is an attempt to deepen the knowledge of the factors that affect the activity patterns of marine copepods. Some of these aspects had not been addressed previously and others still requiredfurther investigation. In particular, this thesis primarily focuses on the study of daily and diel patterns of feeding of marine planktonic copepods, and the influence of factors like ontogeny, gender, food availability, predation threat, light conditions, mutigenerational rearing in the laboratory, and temperature. The experimental work carried out in this thesis mostly consisted of laboratory incubations using wild and laboratory-reared specimens of the calanoid copepods Centropages typicus and Paracartia grani. Among the main findings in this thesis are the stage- and gender-specific differences in the feeding patterns of marine planktonic copepods. Moreover, we analyzed the role of predation risk and that of other factors in the modulation of feeding rhythms, and also evaluated the physiological costs related to temperature fluctuations involved in diel vertical migration. The new insights obtained in this thesis will certainly increase our capability to estimate the grazing impact of copepod populations in plankton communities, and will allow us to obtain better estimates of energy transfer in marine pelagic food webs
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